So, you’ve decided to go after the CPA Market. Great decision! It’s an extremely profitable
route to take, and you will have many opportunities to apply yourself and reap
the rewards!
.......
Okay. Now what?
Where do you start?
I would say that most people’s gut-reaction at this point,
is to go into the markets and niches they know.
It makes sense: it gives them a good point of reference and
understanding of the buyers in that market because they either ARE one or have
experience MARKETING to them.
Unfortunately, as most find out...a comfortable, familiar
market does not automatically mean it’ll be a profitable one.
And if you have decided to GO AFTER the CPA Marketplace,
then we need to de-sensitize ourselves to how we are approaching choosing our
markets: basing our choices entirely on data, rather than emotions.
By creating a GIANT list of possible markets, you kind of
numb your emotions in choosing your markets, and really look at this from a
business standpoint.
Now that we’ve decided to create as big of a list as
possible, let’s put together a simple spreadsheet to keep everything organized
and easy to sort. We use Excel, but you can use whichever spreadsheet or
organizational technique you prefer that is the most efficient for this stage.
In Excel, we will create a very simple spreadsheet with the
first tab named “Master List,” and the second tab named, “Move to Stage 2.” We
will get to that tab at the end of this Stage 1.
Next, we’ll set up our columns, from left to right we have:
Numbered Rows – This will
just help us realize how many zillions of niches there are out there and how
many we’ve recorded!
Date Added – We will only be
updating information on markets/niches after 60 days of being on our
spreadsheet, so it’s important to record the date we added each niche to this
spreadsheet.
Market – We are mainly
concerned with niches on this spreadsheet, but if you can record the markets as
well, it will make it easier to sort later when we are filtering through and
deciding which niches we will be sending to Stage 2.
Niche – This is our focus in
this Stage. We will be recording as many niches as we possibly can, as well as
up to 7 keywords to use in Stage 2 if it makes the cut.
Keywords 1-7 – In this
Stage, we just need to take enough time to list out a few of the high level
keywords to help us later when we create our long list of keywords for our “winning”
niches from Stage 2. Not all niches are going to move on to the subsequent
stages, so we aren’t going to take a lot of time in this stage to flesh out
huge keyword lists now. But we can put
up to 7 now to help us out later if need be.
Total Portal Impressions and
Total Search Traffic – These columns will be used at the end of this
Stage when we put our entire list of niches through a filtering process and
prepare to pass those along to Stage 2. Even though we don’t need these columns
now, let’s create them and make our spreadsheet complete.
Okay. So we’ve created our Niche Research spreadsheet, now
let’s talk about all the different ways we can start unearthing as many niches
as we can. At this stage in the game, don’t spend one minute trying to figure
out if each niche has enough traffic or buyers in it to be profitable for you.
That’s something we’ll worry about later. Right now, let’s just focus on
filling out our first 10 (11 if you count the numbered rows) columns in our
Niche Spreadsheet.
There are many ways to skin a cat (hm, that might be a
niche in and of itself!), and when it comes to finding niches we are going
to attack the web from all sorts of different angles.
I’ve listed out the 5 different paths we’ll be exploring in
our quest to fill out our Niche Spreadsheet. These are in no particular order,
and we suggest you go through a minimum of 3 of them as you find possible
niches:
As you can tell, the paths are
quite different from each other, and pretty much don’t overlap at all. You will
be surprised how many thousands of niches there are out there for you to
discover!
For now, just focus on building your list of niches and
adding up to 7 keywords for each niche. Don’t sweat the small stuff here. We
are throwing out a big net in this Stage, and will be focusing on volume. Don’t
get stuck in any details at this point. Have fun with it!
